Australian coach Eddie Jones doesn’t share his England counterpart’s pessimism over the state of English rugby. On Tuesday, England coach Clive Woodward said his side, which this month lost two successive matches to New Zealand, would never be easier to defeat than in Saturday’s World Cup final rematch against the Wallabies.
Fans in Sweden and Denmark celebrated on Tuesday as both advanced to the quarterfinals of Euro 2004. The two drew 2-2 in Porto to finish level in Group C with five points each. Italy won 2-1 against Bulgaria in Guimaraes to also finish with five points, but was eliminated because of an inferior goal difference.
Wayne Ferreira has played 55 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments, more than anyone in the Open era. The 32-year-old South African celebrated his record with a 5-7, 7-6 (5), 7-5, 6-2 first-round win over Ivan Ljubicic at Wimbledon on Tuesday, allowing him to overhaul Stefan Edberg’s mark of 54 consecutive majors.
Two government officials who allegedly defrauded an estate of a deceased person were arrested on Tuesday by the Directorate of Special Operations (Scorpions) and the Special Investigations Unit, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said. The arrests took place in Mtubatuba and Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal.
The government has vowed to oppose a multi-billion dollar lawsuit lodged by apartheid victims against it and eight big corporations, but says it has received no official notification of the action. It was announced this week the R63-billion lawsuit was filed in the US for ”genocide, expropriation and other wrongful acts” by international companies under apartheid.
Nigeria’s largest cellphone company with about two-million subscribers, South African-owned MTN , has run dry of pre-paid scratch cards due to what officials describe as ”logistical problems”. Hundreds of thousands of angry subscribers have been left unable to replenish their accounts for the past five days.
The City of Cape Town for the second consecutive year has been named the number one long haul destination in the UK’s 2004 Trends and Spends Survey. The survey saw Cape Town beat off contender cities such as New York (second place), followed by Chicago, Boston, Miami, Dubai, Barbados and Las Vegas.
The Western Cape auditor general undertook on Tuesday to investigate a R220 000 overpayment to premier Ebrahim Rasool, and the circumstances surrounding it. The undertaking by auditor general Willie Brits was given at a provincial Standing Committee on Public Accounts meeting called by the Democratic Alliance to investigate the overpayment to Rasool while he was the finance MEC.
South Africa’s second largest financial services group, Sanlam, on Tuesday warned that the HIV/Aids pandemic is not only a human tragedy but also an economic time bomb that poses a major threat to the profitability of companies countrywide.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned United Nations member states not to use him as an excuse for their own inaction in helping to protect more than a million people caught up in fighting in western Sudan. ”We should avoid the situations where we allow member states to hide behind the secretary-general, use him as an alibi for their own inaction,” Annan stressed.